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April 2018

New Priests

Jinja Shinpō has just published the statistics for new graduates of the training courses for priests, as they do every year. I wrote about these last year as well, and similar trends are continuing. This year, 74 students graduated from Kōgakkan University in Isë with a priest’s licence, of whom 46 went to work at jinja. On the other hand, 169 students were licensed by Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, of whom 120 went to work at a jinja. As always, a little under 10% went to work at their family… Read More »New Priests

Invisible Jinja

A couple of weeks ago, Jinja Shinpō ran an editorial about “invisible jinja”. This was not about literally invisible jinja, but rather about the ones that do not show up in any statistics, so most people are not aware of them. There are about 80,000 jinja in Japan that have legal status as religious corporations. There is a great range of sizes and prosperity here, from single jinja that employ dozens of priests to single priests who look after dozens of jinja. One of the major problems that Jinja Honchō… Read More »Invisible Jinja

The Power of Words

I have had a very short piece published in this week’s Jinja Shinpō. On February 11th, which is National Foundation Day, Shinto-related organisations hold events around the country to celebrate it. This national holiday was invented by the Meiji government, and these events are fairly representative of the right-wing and nationalist activities to which jinja are connected. Many of these events are reported, in some detail, in Jinja Shinpō. At one of the meetings, they made a formal declaration, including the phrase “with profound gratitude for being born in Japan,… Read More »The Power of Words